DUNCAN WOOD is the director of the Mexico Institute at the Wilson Center. Prior to this, he was a professor and the director of the International Relations Program at the Instituto Tecnologico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM) in Mexico City for 17 years. He has been a member of the Mexican National Research System, an editorial advisor to both Reforma and El Universal newspapers, and is a member of the editorial board of Foreign Affairs Latinoamerica. In 2007, he was a non-resident Fulbright Fellow and, between 2007 and 2009, he was technical secretary of the Red Mexicana de Energia, a group of experts in the area of energy policy in Mexico. He has been a Senior Associate with the Simon Chair and the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. His research focuses on Mexican energy policy, including renewable energy, and North American relations. He studied in the UK and Canada, receiving his PhD in political studies from Queen’s University, Canada, and is a recipient of the Canadian Governor General’s Visit Award for contributions to the Mexico-Canada relationship.

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Mexico, the Americas, and the World is a biannual public opinion survey conducted since 2004 on public opinion and foreign policy in Mexico and other Latin American countries, including Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. This presentation will give an overview of some of the survey's key findings in 2012. more

Vice-President Joe Biden visited Mexico on Friday to inaugurate the first High Level Economic Dialogue between the two nations. Duncan Wood and Christopher Wilson write about the importance of the dialogue and the role of the vice president. more

Mexico President Enrique Peña Nieto has proposed changing the constitution to allow private investment in Mexico’s oil industry. Is Mexico ready for such an historic move and what might the proposed reforms accomplish? To gain perspective on these and other questions, we spoke with Mexico Institute Director, Duncan Wood. more

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The so-called “Pact for Mexico,” along with the PRI’s likely passage of rule changes this weekend, give Pena Nieto the momentum needed to push for sweeping reforms, said Duncan Wood of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that while a great deal of attention has focused on the arrest’s likely impact on education in Mexico, it is only one part of a larger story about the exercise of power. “It’s not just about education,” he said. “It’s about so much more than that.”

“Making Mexican education more effective, and making sure that Mexicans receive an education that opens up the possibility of meaningful university and college careers afterwards, will be essential if Mexico is to take advantage of the current economic optimism prevailing in the country, and to use it as a steppingstone to an economy based on skilled labor,” said Duncan Wood, director of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute in Washington.

Yesterday’s PGR arrest of Elba Esther Gordillo on charges of embezzlement marks a bold step forward by the Pena Nieto administration to establish its authority and legitimacy in the eyes of the Mexican public, and to send a message to Mexico’s most powerful unions. The arrest comes after the successful passage of an education reform bill through Congress, earning the government plaudits from international observers, who saw it as a much-needed attack on the power of the teachers union, the SNTE, but receiving a skeptical response from many national critics who believed that the government would not follow through with implementation of the new laws.

“There is an enormous amount of optimism right now in the bilateral relationship, and the reason of that is because there’s an idea that this is a new beginning,” said Duncan Wood, co-author of the Wilson Center report, entitled “New Ideas for a New Era”.

Mexico Institute Director Duncan Wood spoke to The Christian Science Monitor about last week's Pemex blast. “More recently opinion polls have suggested there has been a significant softening of those attitudes,” he said. “What all this really depends on is how ambitious the government wants to be.”

In a recent paper published by the Washington-based think tank, Wood said that it is “widely expected” that the Peña Nieto government will present an energy reform initiative to the Mexican Congress early in 2013. “While it is still unknown how ambitious that reform proposal will be, it is thought that the government will present an initiative that will aim at opening the sector to greater levels of private participation in refining, petrochemicals and even in exploration and production.”

“You pull all of this together and you say, well, if they can’t even guarantee safety in their own building, their own headquarters, what does that tell us about the company?” said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “It tells us there are things seriously wrong there. It tells you things need to be seriously shaken up.”

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The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute and CIDAC (Center of Research for Development) are pleased invite you to a discussion of the current state of the Mexican economy. A panel of leading thinkers will discuss both the economic dimensions of the lack of strong growth as well as the politics of slow growth.

As the Mexican congress prepares to debate secondary legislation for energy reform, the leadership of the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) offers its perspective on the process, and on the requirements for a healthy, strong and functioning energy sector.

The Mexico Institute and the Inter-American Dialogue are pleased to invite you to the presentation of the book, The Politics of Crime in Mexico: Democratic Governance in a Security Trap, by John Bailey.

The Mexico Institute is pleased to invite you to a discussion with Mexico’s Secretary of Labor and Social Welfare, Alfonso Navarrete Prida. In November of 2012, Mexico’s congress approved a new labor law that fundamentally alters Mexico’s labor markets, making them much more flexible than before.

The Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute and the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico Project are pleased to invite you to the launch of the book, Building Resilient Communities in Mexico: Civic Responses to Crime and Violence, a new publication produced jointly by the Mexico Institute and the Justice in Mexico Project.

The Mexico Institute is pleased to invite you to the presentation of a new book by Guillermo Valdés Castellanos, The History of Drug Trafficking in Mexico (La historia del narcotráfico en Mexico). Mr. Valdés will present an inventory of the people involved in drug trafficking organizations and the mechanisms they have employed to build their networks.

Over the past few months, Mexico’s PAN party has emerged as the pivotal ally for President Enrique Peña Nieto’s PRI government. In December 2013 it was the PAN which supported the government’s constitutional reform of the energy sector. The leader of the PAN, Gustavo Madero, was instrumental in not only achieving that consensus, but in shaping the legislation itself.

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto will host President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the North American Leaders Summit on February 19. On the eve of the summit, the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute and Canada Institute will host a discussion of the key issues facing the region.

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Mexico's security strategy is evolving with a focus on coordination and violence reduction. Although tensions have emerged in the short term, the long term offers a number of prospects for fruitful collaboration between the United States and Mexico in the security arena.

On March 14, 2013, Duncan Wood, Director of the Wilson Center’s Mexico Institute, testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs’ Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. The hearing, titled “U.S. Energy Security: Enhancing Partnerships with Mexico and Canada,” included a discussion of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement.

Based on the collaborative work of a high‐level group of Mexican energy experts during the first half of 2012, this report focuses on the issues facing Mexico’s hydrocarbon sector and the most important principles that must underlie the forthcoming reform of the country’s oil and gas industry. Although multiple diagnoses of the sector exist, in recent years there has been no fundamental examination of the principles that should underlie the nation’s energy policy.

The U.S.-Mexico border region is one of enormous energy resources, both traditional and renewable. This report provides an overview of the prospects for renewable energy projects in Mexico’s border states, examining the development of wind, solar and municipal solid waste projects. This research evaluates the potential impact of investment in these projects on border communities in terms of employment, infrastructure, human capital and social participation.

With over 1,000 MW of wind energy capacity now installed and another 2,000 MW under construction, Mexico’s wind energy sector has grown dramatically since the early 1990s. This report examines the potential for creating economic benefits in border states from wind energy development, with particular attention paid to employment and infrastructure.

This report recognizes the growing potential for bioenergy, which has attracted public and private sector interest in recent years. It has become clear that Mexico’s land and labor costs make the cross-border trade in renewable energy an exciting and potentially highly profitable sector. Of bioenergy feedstocks, municipal solid waste may represent the greatest potential for growth in Mexico and the U.S.-Mexico transborder region.

First in his series of Monthly Reports on PEMEX and U.S.-Mexico Energy Cooperation, this article explores the implications of the recently signed Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement, which resolves the question of what to do with potential oil reserves along the dividing line between Mexico and the United States in the Gulf of Mexico. Wood sees the agreement as "extremely good news," as it marks the "end of a decades-long process to try to determine oil rights in these two areas, opening the door to exploration and production that offers the prospect of exciting new modes of cooperation between Pemex and private oil companies."